Vehicles such as pickup trucks and vans have been popular, and continue to be popular, in that they generally have larger cargo areas than conventional family sedans of similar size and hence can haul larger items than a conventional sedan.
However, a problem arises when only a portion of the vehicle cargo area is being used to transport one or more small objects. Conventional pick up trucks, station wagons, hatchbacks and vans are conventionally not provided with cargo tie points or barricades by their manufacturers. Further, the floors of these vehicles are typically finished in such a way that smaller cargo items can skid or slide across the floor or tip over while the vehicle is in motion, while particularly during vehicle acceleration or deceleration or cornering.
Common load items which are particularly troublesome include bags of groceries. These often contain items that are breakable and can spill contents that are difficult to clean up, or are hard and have corners that might damage paint or plastic trim on cargo area surfaces. Moreover, vehicle owners frequently wish to maintain the interior of the cargo area in a like-new condition as long as possible, particularly when the cargo area is visible to vehicle passengers, and hence owners are reluctant to deface the walls and floor of the cargo area by permanently installing hooks, eyes, or other permanent attachment points to which cargo items could be secured by straps, line, or elastic shock cord.
Accordingly, the objects of this invention include provision of a load holding device providing a solution to the aforementioned problems, which will not mar the interior surface of the cargo area, which requires no permanent installation, which is readily movable from place to place in the cargo area to fit the needs of different sized or located loads, which is both versatile and simple to use, which can readily be attached or detached to the load floor of the cargo area (be it of painted steel as in a conventional pick up truck, or a loop pile carpet as often as found in the cargo area of stations wagons, hatchback and vans), which is producible in quantity at relatively low cost, which may be used individually or in sets to facilitate lateral securement of cargo items, which may cooperate with existing sidewalls of the cargo area to secure load items in place, and which may additionally be used as a vehicle wheel chock.
Other objects and purposes of the invention will be apparent to persons acquainted with devices of this general type upon reading the following specification and inspecting the accompanying drawings.
The objects and purposes of this invention are met by providing a releasable cargo anti-skid block for gripping the cargo bed of a vehicle, comprising a rigid body having a cargo engageable upstanding side and a cargo bed engageable bottom, the bottom and upstanding side joining at a corner edge, and gripping means on the bottom of the body, the gripping means being adjacent to and extending lengthwise along the corner edge, the gripping means being fixed with respect to the body for forcibly but releasably gripping the surface of the cargo bed of the vehicle.